WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.: Center REPertory Company has announced its 2016–17 season, the company’s 50th. It will contain six productions, including two musicals.
The season will kick off with It Shouda Been You (Sept 2–Oct. 8), with book and lyrics by Brian Hargrove, and music and concept by Barbara Anselmi. The musical comedy shows two families from different backgrounds coming together to celebrate a wedding. Marc Jacobs will direct.
After will be Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery (Oct. 21–Nov. 19), a comedic adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic The Hound of the Baskervilles. Artistic director Michael Butler will direct.
The holidays will contain the theatre’s annual production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (Dec. 8–18). Scott Denison will direct.
Next will be Wendy MacLeod’s Women in Jeopardy! (Jan. 27–Feb. 25, 2017). The comedy follows two middle-aged, female divorcees who decide to investigate their friend’s new boyfriend, who may be a serial killer. Butler will direct.
Philip Kan Gotanda’s Sisters Matsumoto will be next (March 31–April 29, 2017). The play is set in Stockton, Calif. in 1946, as a Japanese-American family return home after internment. Mina Morita will direct.
The season will close with the musical Altar Boyz (May 26–July 1, 2017), with book by Kevin Del Aguila, and music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker. The comedy takes place during the final concert of a Christian and Jewish boy band.
Center REP is the resident professional theatre company of the Lesher Center for the Arts. The theatre puts on six productions a year, a mix of musicals, dramas, and comedies, both classic and contemporary.
